Cross-Pimping, Coming Attractions, and Free Stuff

Cross-Pimping

If you're interesting in reading some totally amateur bits of fiction and textual blurbage, feel free to check out my other blog, Grograma Illusions.

Coming Attractions

There are some other games coming down the pipeline after Shattered Stars launches. I'm not sure exactly which will be next, but likely candidates include (with working titles, but the actual shipping titles may differ):

American Barons
a simple strategy game about business and the economics of the very rich

Legacy
a game about mating, family and society, and the legacy left to each new generation by the choices each person makes today

Ganymede
an adventure and exploration game set in the far future

Murder Most Foul
a murder mystery solving game

Free Stuff

Below you will find a collection of "letters" from something called "the alphabet". It's a little hack I came up with. I invented it last Tuesday, while I was crossing the street. I've provided one of each letter, but feel free to use as many or as little as you need. You're even free to duplicate them, with no strings attached. Simply select whichever ones you want (using the text selection gesture for your computer system), then issue the Copy command, then you can paste them into any target application you want. I recommend a text editor of some kind, then save to a file, for safe keeping. Please, do not try this on a Windows machine. Works perfectly on a Mac, of course.

abcdefghijklmnoprstuvwxyz

Some of you may notice the letter 'q' is missing. We are sorry about that, but our factory in China is having a technical problem and is unable to produce a fresh batch of them until next year. That coupled with the tragic sinking of the last giant Panamax-class container ship bearing our shipment of q's -- just last month off the coast of New Zealand -- has caused us to be temporarily out of this particular and quite popular letter. But hey it's free stuff, so you get what you pay for. I sense a paradoxical inconsistency to this whole story, but it passed the spellchecker, so screw it, I'm hitting Publish.

Sprint to the Finish

My plan is to start a development sprint this week which will culminate in a final, shippable version of Shattered Stars.

On a side note, I can't wait til I can give up Java for good. Though I think it is a decent language, with many strengths, I'm now a much bigger fan of Python and The Python Way of Doing Things. Unfortunately, Shattered Stars is written in Java, as well as many of my other game prototypes, homegrown libraries and tools. So since I have a considerable investment of time and energy and experience-gathering already made with those, in Java, it would probably not be wise to throw it away and start with a blank Pythonic slate. Therefore, I'll be finishing this game, and possibly a few more, in Java with my existing frameworks before I will let myself switch over to Python as my default implementation language of choice. Talk about delayed gratification!

Mike

Shattered Stars Preview

Here's a link to a preview article written about Shattered Stars around the middle of last year. It was of an older version of the game, sort of a snapshot of a work in progress. But it gives a basic feel for the mechanics and scope of the game, and the essentials will be the same in the final shipping version. But it has since gained more features, and more polish. He refers to it as Galactic War in the article but we've since changed the name to Shattered Stars.

http://www.manifestogames.com/blogs/johnny/2006/04/galaxy-is-falling.html

Best estimate currently is that the final version will be ready for sale within the next 4-6 weeks. Fingers crossed. :)

Mike